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The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.
The Linking Open Data Community Project has accomplished a global RESTful SOA giving access to over two billion interlinked statements (RDF triples) from some 50 distributed providers with one serious limitation: this stunning network provides read access only. The upcoming SPARQL Update language is going to overcome this.
What might this be: "envisioned as a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with a minimum of integration costs"? Is this about REST? Nope. According to SWEO, it is about the Semantic Web. Cool URIs will help making this way. So it might be worth looking whether RESTful SOA URIs can also be "cool".
Larger team size prevents from adopting the whole range of language abstraction tools and puts constraints on productivity. Reg Braithwaite believes that tools should not be tuned to the size of the team. He advocates for building teams around the tools and keeping them small. It appears however that team growth is often inevitable. What can be done then to maintain quality and productivity?
Inconsistencies between the user interface and user’s expectations can be an important source of bugs. According to Leonardo Vernazza, this is due the fact that the user and the UI do not talk the same language. Using a DSL, characterized by a high abstraction level, would be instrumental for avoiding the risk of translation errors and would therefore reduce the testing burden.
With an increasingly global workforce, face-to-face meetings are becoming rarer these days. In their place, we more frequently conduct business with a very different experience using a teleconference line supported by desktop sharing tools. Tips and tricks effectively facilitating these interactions, an emerging and important skill, are covered in this article.
The typical Agile team may work in a common "teamroom", but personal space is also needed. Teams find out fast enough that some of the creature comforts left behind in their former traditional spaces were there for good reasons. This article shares the collected wisdom of dozens of teams who created their own work spaces, as collected by several experienced Agile coaches.
James Taylor looks at the challenge that arises when the new requirements are not really requirements at all, but new or changed business rules. Aren't business rules the same as requirements? Taylor says: no, not really; and looks at how to make an agile development processes work just as well for business rules as they do for other kinds of requirements.
In this short InfoQ interview, Nils Haugen spoke with Floyd Marinescu about the "Planning Poker" technique he relies on to improve team estimates. Having consciously experimented with it for a while, he described this simple practice and why it works: by making space for team members to each contribute their own perspective. In this way, it's good for estimates and for teambuilding.
For those getting started with Agile, this book offers a detailed first-person account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a distributed team of 40 people, and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.
